Having lost most of the people with whom I was at one point or another intimately connected, I become more melancholy than I’m proud to say. Sometimes it can be difficult to descry the margins that separate valid and wistful. But frequently, both are the halters that pull me back inside myself.
Tonight I thought about a story – or really a whispered report – that a girl named Darian gave back when we were friends. She was in a counseling graduate program at the time, as I am now, and went to see a psychologist because it’s “good practice” to do so. Without hearing much at all, she said, the psychologist knew about her inappropriate spending sprees, her excessive sleeping. She felt found out, but I knew she also felt a little special…heard.
Before this summer, when the warming memory of one of our good interactions would bubble, the thought was always accompanied by the idea that Darian and I might talk again. I questioned whether we would still look into one another and see the same things, but I missed what I used to see. I saw another version of me.
It was July when I found out Darian died from a blood infection that would have been treatable if they’d known. And the scenes of our connection still come, still followed by a hope; the more deeply I become engaged in a good memory, the more achy that brief jolt to the chest feels when I remember that she’s gone. It’s selfish, really. The thought is, “What girl will see my universe now? What friend will know me?” And the irrational fear that follows is, maybe no one.
With love to Darian. She was self-indulgent, too.
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